Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is the 1st entry in the Civ franchise to be built from the ground up for consoles. Players choose one of 16 world leaders throughout history to play as, and take on 4 other leaders (with all 4 determined by the AI if playing offline; or 3 other human players and 1 computer AI in an online game) for world conquest. The goal is to be the first to achieve one of 4 victory conditions: Economic, Cultural, Domination, or Technology. As someone that’s never played a Civ game on the PC, and playing it for approximately 2 months straight, I can recommend that it’s definitely worth a full-price purchase. It has more depth and replay value than anticipated, and although not without its flaws, it’s a solid entry for it’s introduction as new console IP turn-based strategy game.

Review:

Gary Smolinski's (phoenix1967) review:

When starting the game, you have difficulty choices for Chieftain/Warlord/King/Emperor/and Deity. For newbies to Civ, when starting out, the Chieftain difficulty will be a good staring point for most players to get used to the mechanics & fundamentals of play.

Through the course of the game, the leader you choose at the beginning will have unique abilities to his/her Civilization that unlock as you reach new milestone eras (Ancient, Medieval, Industrial, and Modern) by researching new Technologies. You start off with 1 city, and opportunities throughout the game will come to takeover/develop others through military conquest, culture “flip”, or by creating settlers from one of your existing cities and sending them out to develop a new area of land. The aspects of city development include food (to increase a city’s population), gold (to increase the ability to “rush” production capabilities), the production of military units (land, sea, and air), buildings (to enable the construction of some military units, additional buildings to develop the land, achieve further production bonuses, etc.), and great Wonders (to further Cultural development), and Science (to research Technologies to advance your Civ). The player needs to judge the importance of each of these aspects in developing their cities for themselves from the city menu and adjust their appropriate levels as one sees fit. However, if you focus too much on one area over the others, it may cost your Civ in the long run.

As play proceeds, with a unique world map each time in the standard game, players only see a small part of the world they inhabit and need to create military ground units to scout out the surrounding areas in order to lift the “fog of war” and take out barbarian tribes that are scattered about the world. Conquering these barbarian tribes provides a nice bonus in the form of gold, a military unit, a technology you do not have, a galley for sea travel, etc.for your use in the early stages of the game. They also can provide clues as to the location/# of great artifacts (1-6 usually) that are believed to be located throughout the world. These artifacts can greatly impact the game, so it’s best to try to be the first to reach them (i.e. discovering The Ark of the Covenant instantly builds temples in all of your cities, or cathedrals if you already have temples, to give you a big cultural boost; or discovering the Lost City of Atlantis provides you with multiple techs; etc.). 2K Games has also released several Artifact/Wonder packs as DLC for the game to add more to this area of the game. Artifacts are random for each game with the exception of Atlantis (which is only found in deep water & requires Navigation technology and a Galleon to find).

Your other 4 enemy Civs will occasionally pop up as you’re developing your own and wish to either trade technologies (which adds to each Civ’s evolution), offer peace, or give you an ultimatum towards war if you do not give them a tech of yours that they seek. You also have advisers that can provide information regarding the status of the game to suggest how to deal with other Civs making such threats and/or suggest new technologies to develop. They also provide news on when a rival Civ has reached certain levels of the game regarding the victory conditions.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this game is the fact that 4 victory conditions exist: Cultural (obtain a combination of 20 Great People, converted or “Flipped” cities of other Civs, and completed Wonders & then build the United Nations), Economic (obtain 20000 gold and build the World Bank), Technological (build a rocket and reach Alpha Centauri), or Domination (overwhelm all 4 other Civs with military force). This variety adds a great measure of replay value to the game. Some Civs are stronger in each area than others, but many are capable of winning in the secondary ways. The game tracks your progress along the way on each difficulty level and knows what types of victories you’ve had with each civilization. For example, if you go to the options menu and go to the Hall of Glory(?), you will eventually see a bust of each of the 16 leaders and the highest level of each victory obtained by color code. It also shows it to you when you’ve selected a difficulty setting & you’re at the initial leader selection screen, but only for the types of victories you’ve obtained on that difficulty (not color coded).

The sounds of Civ Rev are very good, especially if you have a stereo or home theater setup with your TV. Every sword battle, bullet fired, etc. sound well thought out in putting the game together. Also, background effects and the music score are definitely incorporated well into the game and add to its overall atmosphere. The only aspect of controversy in this area is whether or not you tolerate the “gibberish” of the advisers & other Civ leaders, since there’s no semblance of any language when they’re speaking to you. I have no issue with it, but other gamers might.

Graphics-wise, the game is an excellent representation of what is capable of current gen hardware. The entire presentation is very colorful to watch, military units and player menus are very crisp, maps features are easily identified, and battle sequences are handled well (but occasionally exhibit a small element of choppiness, and sometimes framerate falls).

Gameplay is handled very well with the controller. When navigating menus, moving units from one location to another, and/or when going into battle, the controller is utilized very well and the interface is very user-friendly. One thing to note, though, is that the game will only remind you to save when you reach each new era. You can save any time, so save often, and in multiple slots so that if you’ve made significant progress but take a setback, you can have the option for a do-over. One aspect of the game that could’ve been tweaked & improved is the AI. They are sometimes predictable in their strategies and sometimes don’t do things that would make sense from a human point of view (i.e. use spies in the late-game to steal gold/Great people instead of always using them to lower city defenses in battle). There’s also the occasional glitchy “cheat” where a ship of theirs will border the land and unit after unit will keep coming after you until you’ve destroyed their ship (where there’s no way they could’ve produced as many units that they did); sometimes there’s not even a ship at all...units will just “show up” on your shores. This glitch is easily forgivable, though, since if it wasn’t in the game, it might make victories with some Civs a little too easy. For future versions of the game, though, it’d be a good idea to put a little more time into the AI.

The game also utilizes the the Xbox 360 achievement system very well. And you don’t need to use the online multiplayer to get ANY of them, they can all be obtained offline. You’ll get gamerscore points early on for simple things like taking over a city or a military unit getting an upgrade. And there’s achievements for winning with the 16 Civs individually, and a 17th achievement if you win with all 16 of them. Other achievements can be more difficult to obtain, but are not unreasonable.

Additionally, the game comes with 8-10 scenarios to play. These come with a fixed map and change the rules of the game slightly so more of a focus is on obtaining one of the other victory conditions. For example, in the Beta Centauri scenario the theme is that all of the Civs have reached Alpha Centauri by rocket ship, so the Technology victory condition is eliminated, but ALL technologies are available to each player; one can only win by 1 of the other 3 conditions. One of the downloadable scenarios is Ice Age, where much more of the map is covered in Ice and there’s therefore much less available for city development; and the barbarians are much tougher.

Lastly, another aspect I truly enjoy is the ability to complete one game in about 3-5 hours (roughly). I’ve heard stories about people playing a Civ PC the game for 10-16+ hours and am glad that Sid Meier and his team chose not to go that route for this console version.

Overall, despite it’s minor flaws, Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is an excellent turn-based strategy game for this generation. With excellent interface, graphics, variety, & gameplay depth, I heartily recommend picking this one up and look forward to a sequel (hopefully with even more options, Civs, technologies, etc.).